At about that time I was once sitting at my place and whispering--it was naughty, I know--with my neighbor. Then you, Herr Profess...or Rudner, got up from your desk, came calmly down the aisle to me: "Did you speak?" and slapped me smack in the face. And I--the fury is inside me to this day--I didn't hit back. Such were the methods of objectivity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

If the jests that you crack have an orthodox smack,You may get a bland smile from these sages;...But should it, by chance, be imported from France,Half-a-crown is stopped out of your wages!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Trains are for meditation, for playing out long thought-processes, over and over; we trust them, perhaps because they have no choi...ce but to go where they are going. Nowadays, however, they smack of a dying gentility. To travel by car makes journeys less mysterious, too much a matter of the will. One might as easily sit on a sofa and imagine a passing landscape. I doubt whether any truly absorbing conversation ever took place in a car; they are good only for word games and long, tedious narratives. We have come to regard cars too much as appendages of our bodies and will probably pay for it in the end by losing the use of our legs. We owe to them the cluttering of the landscape, the breakup of villages and towns.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »